Canon Pixma iP4000R review

Decidedly retro on the outside, this printer is anything but that under the hood.

The Canon Pixma iP4000R has double paper trays, five individual cartridges, Ethernet and USB connections, and built-in 802.11g Wi-Fi features for printing on a home network. Around the back, there's a cleverly hidden duplexer that's so compact it doesn't protrude, while to the front, a fold-down flap will suck in CDs on a bundled tray and print directly onto their faces.

As you'd expect, with so many features it's fairly chunky, and with the front paper catcher pulled out, it occupies around one and a half square feet of desk space. However, the power and data connectors are arranged around the sides, rather than the back, so it can be pushed right up against a wall.

The two paper sources can be stacked simultaneously, and the one in use chosen through either the driver or a dedicated button on the front of the device. This lets you keep up to 150 pages of photo and photocopier paper handy, or headed paper in one, and plain in the other.

It was no slouch when it came to print speeds. Standard-quality text, printed from Word, arrived at a rate of one page every 11 seconds. Dropping the quality to 'fast' upped this to six seconds a page, but the characters took a heavy hit. Where they had been a solid black with razor-sharp edges at the default setting, they had a grey caste and the edges were compromised at higher speeds.

The duplex driver gives options for allowing extra margin space and setting aside room for binding options. Leaving everything set to default and printing the same five pages, the job completed in exactly three minutes. That's actually quite slow, but still faster than manually turning over each page for the second print. Quality, though, was first class, with no obvious problems caused by putting ink on both sides of the page.

Photos, too, were very good. At the best quality setting and on Canon Photo Paper Pro they were almost indistinguishable from professionally printed photos, with realistic skin tones and well-defined transitions on sharp edges. At 59 seconds, it took double the time on this setting than the default, but the output was more than twice as good, and certainly worth the extra effort. The results were also considerably warmer-looking, and more inviting.

The extra half-strength black cartridge really came in to play when we switched the driver to greyscale mode, as it produced excellent definition in our photos. Illuminated night-time scenes, which had already benefited from a pure black sky when printed in colour, were more appealing in mono.

Switching to greyscale this way cut the A4 photo print time from two minutes five seconds to one minute 45 seconds, which was impressive considering the quality of the prints. This feature alone should attract semi-professional and hobbyist photographers.

We had only one complaint with our review model: there was was a slight tendency to band where one of the nozzles in the print-head was blocking. Cleaning and upping the quality setting sorted it out each time, but replacing the disposable cartridge holder would have been a simple, long-term fix. Other than that, the worst we can find to say about it is the Canon Pixma iP4000R's case has a tendency to show your fingerprints.